Five people, including two children, have been killed in a car crash on the M6 in Cumbria.
The incident took place on the northbound carriageway not far from Tebay services on Tuesday afternoon, Cumbria constabulary said. Officers were called to the crash, involving a Škoda and a Toyota, at 4.04pm.
A man, woman and two children, all from Glasgow, were in the Toyota and were pronounced dead at the scene. A third child in the Toyota was airlifted to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle with serious injuries.
The driver of the Škoda, a man from Cambridgeshire, was also pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said the motorway was closed from junction 36 to 39 and reopened in the early hours of Tuesday.
Chris Isles, a publican from Kirkoswald, near Penrith, said he was about 45 metres away from the accident and saw black smoke and flames.
“From where I was, 50 yards further back, it just seemed like a vehicle fire,” he told the PA news agency. “I was parked up and I could see the smoke. It hadn’t really happened that long. I literally must have been two minutes behind it happening.
“I got out of my (campervan) and just looked down the line and between the lines of vehicles in front of me; I could see there was quite a big fire that started. This was at 4.10pm. Less than 20 minutes later the air ambulance was there.”
Isles took a photo of smoke billowing into the sky. He was driving home and expecting to be on the motorway for seven minutes but it ended up being three and a half hours.
“I was up near the front. They seemed to have turned everybody back from the back of the queue forward. So where we were, we were probably some of the last people to get off. It was about half past seven when we eventually got moved.”
He said he felt “really shocked” at the incident and was “thinking of the family of everybody” involved. “It’s terrible. It never crossed my mind that there would have been five people killed. It’s awful.”
The crash was also attended by Great North air ambulance, the north-west ambulance service, Cumbria fire and rescue service and volunteer doctors who were part of the group Beep Doctors.
The families of those involved were being supported by specially trained officers, the force said.
Police appealed for anyone with information to contact them online at www.cumbria.police.uk/report-it, quoting incident number 146 of 15 October 2024; or by phoning 101.
